Creepy Crawlies
by Vortex82
Summary: Sanji's day started out so well, but, alas, did not end in such a fashion.


**Disclaimer** : I own nothing. If anyone wants the titled creepy crawlies, they're welcome to them!

 **Warnings** : Language and something that may or may not be classifiable as shounen-ai – I believe it could be taken any way the reader prefers but I'm not sure so I thought I'd better include a warning.

Basically I got bored and decided to torture Sanji for kicks and giggles. Not to be taken seriously. Reviews and constructive criticism very much appreciated. Thank you for reading :)

* * *

 **Creepy Crawlies**

The day had started off so well that by the end of it Sanji was left scrabbling to work out how things had all deteriorated quite as quickly and comprehensively as they had. He was also left half naked in the ocean trying not drown, but it was probably best to start at the beginning.

After happening upon a small, uninhabited island and anchoring a little way off shore, they had performed a brief exploration. Sanji had decided the place was damn near perfect for four distinct reasons.

First and foremost, the weather was on the warmer side of comfortable, prompting Nami and Robin to strip right down to their bare essentials (~Mellorine!~). Second, it was a tiny, flat island with one set of ruins in the middle that to Sanji's untrained eye looked like a religious monument from ages past and no foliage above chest height. The Sunny could be seen from every part of the island and even a directionally retarded moss-for-brains couldn't get himself lost if he tried. If by some miracle he did manage it, he would be found easily enough by just standing up; one less thing for them all to worry about.

Third, there were a whole bunch of rock pools on the north shore containing inedible crabs with a ridiculous and varying amount of eyes on stalks. Not really Sanji's thing, true, but Luffy had been fascinated. He, Franky and Usopp were instantly captivated and a contest had been declared between the three of them as to who could catch the one with the most eyes; Brook was nominated referee. The good part about this was that it took so long to count them, and that the four of them did so... quietly. It was sort of eerie, but Sanji was not about to question it when he found himself free of rubbery captains whining at him for snacks.

Fourth and finally, some of the foliage appeared to be a thick, shrubby sort of orange tree. The fruits they bore were orange in colour, sweet and wrapped in a thick peel anyway, even if they were the size of watermelons and the bushes they grew on looked more like squashed, sideways trees than the ones in Nami-san's sacred mikan grove. Chopper had verified them to be edible just before he had gone diving into one of the other bushes with a delighted squeak after some sort of berry he could apparently use for a mild topical anaesthetic.

In short, everyone had something to do that didn't involve bothering him, and Sanji had been able to gather up a sizeable amount of vitamin C for freshly squeezed juice with a very real promise of being able to spend the next few hours indulging his culinary creativity without interruption. That didn't happen often, so he hurried perhaps a little more than he should have done while filling a huge barrel with oranges.

This was his first mistake.

If he had gone a bit slower he probably would have noticed that one of the giant oranges was not the same as the others. If he hadn't been splitting his attention so unequally between watching out for Luffy and co in the distance and harvesting the ripe oranges he would have noticed the one that was neither the right colour nor texture.

Alas, he did not and was still unaware of the horror in his unwitting possession an hour or so later when he was back on board Sunny, chopping the oranges up to make juice before getting started on lunch. The little boy in him, in fact, was even thrilled to have a legitimate excuse to use his longest knife.

Nami-san was drawing up a map of the island out in the sunshine after completing a survey, Robin-chan was still looking over the ruins, Chopper had roped Brook into helping him with his berries after the skeleton got bored with no end in sight to the fierce, many-eyed crab contest that was still in full swing and who knew where the idiot swordsman was but he was probably snoring. Sanji was happy to be the only one on board at least for a little while and everything was so peaceful he actually started humming a random tune to himself.

The sound died in his throat, however, as the galley door banged opened and a green-haired annoyance walked in. They exchanged hostile, acrid glares, as was their customary greeting when neither was especially infuriated with the other, and Zoro walked up to the counter.

"Oi, cook. Sake."

Sanji felt the stock of warm-fuzzy-mellow he'd been building up all day drop a few notches. There was still a remarkable amount left though and a charitable mood took him. "Add a 'please' and I might just let you have some, shithead."

"What for? You're the ship's cook, I'm only asking you to do your job. That doesn't need a 'please' does it?"

Sanji felt his eyebrow twitch. He hated it when that happened, and it happened a lot during any interactions with Zoro. "It's polite."

"Why would I be polite to you?"

"You're an ass. A green-haired ape of an ass." Sanji growled, his supply of mellow suddenly depleting to a dangerous low. "Just sit the hell down and wait quietly while I finish this up and I'll get your damn booze."

He shot a glare over his shoulder to confirm the idiot was following orders and scowled when he found a beady pair of dark eyes glaring right back at him. Zoro was now sitting – well, more like sprawling – as instructed and he was being quiet, but he was also staring. Sanji felt his eyebrow twitch again and turned back to his monstrous oranges. How the hell the man still managed to annoy him even when doing as he asked was beyond him. Zoro had a special gift when it came to infuriating him.

The silent staring continued as he chopped with ever-increasing ferocity, Sanji could feel the other man's eyes boring into the back of his neck and his temper rose with every second that passed. He was half-tempted to just get the damn booze or demand he stop freaking staring, but that would mean admitting that something the Marimo did was getting to him and so he remained silent and seething.

And not paying attention to what he was doing.

In his mounting fury, Sanji slammed the knife down on another giant orange with more force than was strictly necessary. It should have split into two neat halves like the many he'd cleaved before it, this one possibly trembling from the violence, and it took a few seconds to register that it hadn't. Instead of the blade slicing all the way through to the chopping board beneath, this orange had sort of just squished down and absorbed the blow. Actually, now he was looking properly at this orange he noted it was not in fact orange either; it was a murky sort of gray.

The stupid Marimo forgotten for a moment, Sanji turned his full attention to the rogue orange. He pulled the knife out from where it had sunk in to the top, cutting just a little into the strange gray skin, and that was when his day went completely to hell.

Spiders.

Thousands of squiggly, evil freaking _spiders_ exploded out of the not-orange the moment he removed the knife. Horror washed over him from head to foot him like a simultaneously hot and cold waterfall dousing him from above. He had a mere half-second of rationality before panic surged to scatter his wits in which his last coherent thought was that maybe 'thousands' was a bit of an exaggeration, but there were definitely a lot of the buggers, they were pretty big, and, oh, they were scuttling all over his hands and arms now. Then the terror hit with a vengeance.

He screamed, there was no denying it, like a little girl and leapt away from the monstrous orange that was actually a giant egg sac. He flung the knife away at high velocity in some random direction – exactly where it went he neither knew nor cared. It was covered with spiders and so needed to be far, far away from him.

A yelp and a thud off to his right barely registered, but he didn't stop to process it. There were large spiders in his clothes; weird noises could freaking wait. He tore his jacket off, not caring that he was ripping buttons, and shuddered as he swore he felt their revolting, hairy legs dance across his skin.

For a moment he froze stock still. They were under his clothes; touching his skin. Then the spell broke and he became a blur of twisting, spinning derangement.

He fought his way out of his shirt violently to the musical accompaniment of more buttons pinging off, and nearly choked himself when it caught on his tie. He was far too panicked to realise the problem and just kept yanking until something gave. The tie, the shirt-collar or his vertebrae, right now he really didn't care which it was so long as the spider-infested garment was removed from his vicinity. His pants followed after a frenzied struggle with his belt buckle.

They were on his legs, he swore he could feel them scurrying through his leg-hair, and he spun his body round to fling them off with every bit of strength he could muster. With his legs involved, that was a fair amount of strength. Centrifugal force did its thing and without him making any effort to keep his shoes and socks on his feet they went flying. Something smashed, something crunched and he felt his bare heel collide with something else that buckled.

The immediate problem of spidery clothes and skin taken care of, he turned to bolt. He ran straight into the counter and screamed out profanities as his hips came to a painful halt the moment they hit the solid bar but his torso kept going until it slammed down on the countertop. He could tend the bruises later. Arachnids were loose in the kitchen. Right now he needed to flee.

Bending in ways that even surprised himself he managed to vault the counter from his awkward position with an unexpected, desperate sort of grace and hit the ground sprinting on the other side. A dark shape materialised between him and the door. He didn't stop.

The collision with the unknown object was even more jarring than his encounter with the bar, only this time the thing he ran into grunted and grabbed him. He yelped and struggled, his mind helpfully providing him with a vision of six-foot spider intent on eating his brains and he was still far too distressed to realise how ridiculous that was.

"Oi! What the hell is wrong with you?!"

The deep, urgent voice bellowing right in his ear hit him like a stray gum-gum rocket to the gut. And as he was all too aware, those had some amazing stopping power. He froze, blinked and finally managed to gather enough of his wits out of hiding to assess the situation at least at an executive summary level: he had just freaked the fuck out and Zoro had seen it.

"Shit!" he said aloud because things were way too bad for the sentiment to remain just in his head. After that he didn't really know what to do, other than stare wretchedly back at Zoro who was currently about half a centimetre away, levelling him with an agitated glare and all but holding him up with a hard grip on his upper arms. Zoro was perturbed and Sanji's entire wardrobe now consisted of his boxers and a tie. The tie was hopelessly askew. "Shit."

"What the hell, cook? What's with flinging knives at people and screaming?"

Sanji winced at the tone as Zoro repeated his, admittedly, valid question. That tone was a demand to know where the danger was, to know what had scared his usually stalwart nakama so bad and Sanji felt a pool of dread gather in his gut at the thought of telling him. He'd laugh his arse off for sure, and that the best possible outcome Sanji could think of.

"S'iders..." Sanji finally managed to force out in a tiny, frightened voice that he barely recognised as his own and made him want to gag in embarrassment.

"Huh?"

Sanji closed his eyes and took a deep, fortifying breath. "I said spiders!" he yelled, channelling all his dread and chagrin into hot fury instead. "There were shitting spiders, shit loads of the little bastards you shitty Marimo shit!"

Zoro raised a brow, possibly at just how many times he'd managed to cram the word 'shit' into a single sentence even for him, and glanced over Sanji's shoulder. So sue him, he swore a lot when he was unnerved.

"Yeah, I can see that you moron." Zoro said in a way that implied he was only just holding back his temper. The tone however was lost on Sanji this time as the words hit him hard and a tongue of ice licked up his spine. Right. Spiders. There were still a metric crap-tonne of spiders within twenty feet of his person. "Are they poisonous or something?"

"No idea." he said after swallowing with all his might to clear the terror-induced lump stuck in his throat. "I don't know..." he trailed off as he forced himself to look behind him. That familiar, irrational fear clenched in his chest as he took in the sight. He knew it was stupid to be so afraid of the things, and he hated it, but he just couldn't help his automatic reactions sometimes.

They were still there. With no exaggeration there were hundreds of them, each the size of one of Nami's mikans and moving in that horrific way that only spiders could. Scuttling along in quick bursts and unexpected halts, all chunky black bodies and countless hairy legs. Fanning out steadily in every direction in a hideous mass from the egg sac and contaminating his precious kitchen more and more with each diabolical, eight-legged step they took. Usually his little phobia wasn't nearly this bad. One or two creepy-crawlies, even large ones, were not a huge problem for him, but that many of them taking him by surprise and especially spiders... he swallowed thickly.

Sanji shuddered. They were just far enough away that the panic didn't consume him, but, well, there was not a force on this ocean or any other that could ever compel him to take so much as a single step back towards that chopping board and his heart still hadn't quite made it all the back from his throat to its rightful place.

Unable to take the sight a second longer, he closed his eyes to blot out the hellish vision and let his head fall forward until it met something solid to lean against. He focussed on getting his heart rate and breathing under control so fully that he didn't notice when his arms began moving on their own. It was only when a strong scent of steel and lemon oil hit his nose – from where it had somehow become buried in the crook of Zoro's neck – that he was struck with the nauseating truth of his position.

He was _hugging_ Zoro like an overgrown child with a hideous green-furred teddy bear.

A sound escaped him, somewhere between a choke and a gasp, and for a few seconds he was absolutely paralyzed. He felt his face heat up in mortification. Slowly he pulled back to look at Zoro's face and assess the damage. He was surprised to find a light dusting of pink across the swordsman's own nose, which was wrinkled up in a sort of incredulous snarl.

Zoro looked like he'd just downed a glass of raw lemon juice and was both bewildered and embarrassed about it.

They both started spluttering at the same time; Sanji struggling with what to say in order to explain his bizarre behaviour in a way that didn't make him look like a huge wuss and Zoro struggling with who the hell knew what but it probably involved asking where Sanji's dignity had evaporated off to.

Then, just because the situation wasn't awkward enough already, Usopp decided on that moment to make an appearance and ensure that things were ballsed up properly to his standards of excellence.

The sniper burst through the galley door waving a crustacean about and loudly proclaiming his victory in the many-eyed-crab-contest. His eyes fell on Zoro and Sanji, essentially in each other's arms with their faces scant centimetres apart, both blushing and one of them seriously underdressed, and froze stock still with his arms flung out, mouth open and one foot off the ground. Time passed, a few seconds in which all three were still and silent as though some higher authority had paused reality. And then, randomly, someone pressed play.

Usopp dropped his crab; it landed on its back with a dull thud. Then he lowered his raised foot to the floor. It took him two tries to close his mouth, but he managed it eventually. The crab flipped itself over and scuttled sideways a bit. Usopp dropped into a deep bow.

"P-please excuse the intrusion!"

Usopp then fled the kitchen, leaving his crab behind, and Sanji let out a pitiable groan. He closed his eyes, tipped his head back and took a deep, fortifying breath. Just as he reopened his eyes and was about to start speaking – exactly what words he was going to employ unknown at this point – he happened to catch a flicker of movement somewhere around Zoro's left shoulder. His gaze snapped to the pinpoint the source and his body tensed as his irrational fears were confirmed.

There was a spider the size of an orange on the moss-head's shoulder. He would have been able to cope with that if it hadn't then gotten so, so much worse – he was certain he felt something scuttle between his inner thigh and the material of his boxers. Whether the sensation was imagined or real, he was suddenly consumed with the idea that there were spiders frolicking about in his underwear and that was far too much for his already frayed nerves to handle.

Sanji let out a strangled oath of a shriek and took the only sensible course of action open to him. He mule kicked Zoro across the galley, bolted through the door to the upper deck and threw himself overboard.


End file.
